I remember reading Average is Over and A Fairwell to Alms just when I first started working. They convinced me that labour power was going to decline precipitously. I stared saving 60+% of everything I made and putting it into index funds. Anyone making a good salary should attempt the same. Much of white collar work is extremely amenable to automation, much more than even truck driving:<a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox" rel="nofollow">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec%27s_paradox</a><p>Maybe comparative advantage will save the day, but I think it is a really good idea to start accumulating capital, even at today’s valuations.
> <i>Q: Several studies show technology will disrupt jobs, but they also argue that almost as many jobs will be created.</i><p>> <i>A: There’s a mismatch of job displacement and job creation. Job displacement is being driven at the speed of digital technology, which is explosive at this moment. And displacement is the business model for the AI geniuses and all those companies. All of them are hoping to get rich by displacing workers, not by creating jobs. Creating jobs is much slower. So, at least in the next few years, the displacement will outstrip the creation. But it’s not the direction of travel which is wrong. It’s just a mismatch of speed.</i><p>Citation needed. There's zero evidence that "creating jobs is slower." People have been saying this every year for well over a century, and yet unemployment is quite low right now in the US.<p>It's one of those things that seems logical -- but all evidence is to the contrary. And it's probably because it's a lot easier for the human brain to spot a huge loss of jobs in one industry, than a small increase across many industries that adds up to the same size.<p>Also, the jobs can <i>already exist</i> but just not be filled. We don't necessarily need to wait for them to be "created".
My problem with this take is that people --- including me! --- have been predicting this for decades because the logic just seems so clear, yet unemployment is still low and long-term real wages have not declined, in fact around the world and in most wealth bands they have risen dramatically.<p>I don't think there's some benevolent cosmic law that ensures job creation will always match job destruction, so I can't assume these dire predictions will never come true. But after so many years crying wolf it's hard to take them seriously until macroeconomic indicators show they're happening.
This guy is straining to get his new words to become memes.<p>"Globotics". "Telemigration". Please. Companies have been outsourcing call centers to India for decades now. That trend seems to have peaked; outside of telemarketing, the lower cost isn't worth the lower performance.
The next phase of globalization is the devaluation of fossil fuels and agriculture commodities making whole countries economies untenable leading towards mass migration far more extreme than the recent past...
The people most worried about AI are the ones not working on it. We don't know how to initialise a simple feed forward neural network yet let alone train it efficiently. It will be centuries before the theory catches up with the proctice. Until then we might as well be monks cross pollinating plants worried about genetic modification.
<i>By trying to be more flexible with work, you thought you were getting control of your life. You could come home and take care of the kids while handling a few emails. But you actually arranged it so you ended up out of work because a telemigrant took your job for much less.</i><p>I keep thinking about the age-old discussion about why the tech industry doesn't just move away from Silicon Valley to a location with a low cost of living. And the answer usually involves the existence of a critical mass of highly effective potential employees, of a cluster economy. There really are some jobs whose pay rates do not matter. <i>But not all that many.</i> All the rest will sooner or later be vulnerable to global outsourcing/telemigration.
> Globalization always means more opportunities for the nation’s most competitive citizens, but more competition for the least competitive citizens. The trouble is that in the services sector there are a lot of uncompetitive people.<p>This will end well.
I'm curious how long the world will take to normalize all nations. China cannot be the world's factory forever. China seems to be setting Africa up for a similar position as it rises. What happens when we run out of poorer countries to make stuff? Do we bring that home? Prices will surely need to go up in the case of domestic labor. I'm super curious how this will unfold.
I think what many authors/technologists like Mr. Baldwin overlook are the impacts of Data Privacy and Locality laws will have on automation efforts described in this article.
Jobs are essentially slavery and ditching them should be good for everyone. All we need to do is build a society that meets the basic needs of the population. We already have some tools and ideas to experiment with. Mourning the old order won't bring it back or delay change, only complicate this transition.
It's looking more like work is becoming pointless but society still makes us do it. I would hope UBI speeds up automation.<p>In particular AI sucks, but virtually integrated expert systems don't. Too bad they have a hard time emerging under capitalism. Because your supply chain is always insanely stupid mega rent seekers.<p>Maybe some aquiponics megaco-op can ensure its automation engineers don't starve, which will be to socialism what the loom was to industrial capitalism. Get on it Mondragon.
Not buying it, sorry. Maybe some jobs, but all this nonsense about automation taking over everything is purely to sow FUD and for no other reason.<p>Oh, automatic trucks, yeah, probably not. That's going to be really hard to pull off because the first time one of those trucks crushes and kills a toddler, the liability is going to rise tremendously. Same with drones--the first one that crashes into a house and causes a fire that kills a whole family is going to force them to reconsider their idiotic plans. It doesn't matter how you design the things because the tech isn't what is important.<p>As far as replacing the software engineering work I do with "freelancers" is a sure way to put my whole company out of business. If there were any freelancers out there who could assist us we would have already hired them. We don't want "freelancers" we want people who will be around to build up institutional knowledge and perform because they know our company and our data. As it is, our office in India is about 30% as efficient as the one on the US, and that whole experiment has already been running for almost two decades. It's not just the timezones, it's just the whole nature of the job. We have people with 15-20 years of experience working with us. It's just too naive a picture to say "globotics" which is just a made up word--even says so in the article. If you want good outcomes in a corporation, it would be wise to hire good people and not just stock up on human cattle.